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Friday, July 8, 2011

Ancestry Finder from 23&Me

So stepping away a bit from paper trail ancestry and back to genealogy from 23andme, I decided to take some screen shots from a tool called "Ancestry Finder" and talk a bit about its awesomeness and the results I have. So 23andme has some really cool stuff that you can get dragged into sometimes it seems for hours. Among them besides Relative Finder, Ancestry Painting, Maternal/Paternal Haplogroups and the "My Health" Section there is the Ancestry Finder tool. So the way it works is you fill out a survey telling them where your four grandparents were born (there are some more questions but you only see the countries they list). From those answers, whoever matches you as a cousin will show up in where ever they match you along your chromosomes and then show the countries where the grandparents were born. What's real cool about it is that you can switch around controls in the advanced options to what you'll like to see. For example, here is my Ancestry Finder set to: "5cm" Minimum Segment Size and 4 Grandparents born in the same country.

My results for Ancestry Finder

I added the countries over the bars to show where the grandparents were from. I was VERY surprised by the results; I matched people with grandparents born in Cuba, Columbia, Mexico, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, Russia, and the U.K. This doesn't mean that you have direct ancestors from there but that someone centuries ago from in your ancestry could have moved there, had extended family there, etc.. The ones that surprised me the most were ones like Lithuania and Russia! These are unexpected I would say for me being that my family is from Puerto Rico and you don't really hear about these groups having descendants in Puerto Rico.I do match people from Puerto Rico but since I didn't set it to show matches from the "US" they didn't show up.

You can also change around the advanced settings to 1+, 2+, 3+, born in the same country; to show matches from the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand & South Africa; to show public segments; indicate segments people have marked to be of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry and the minimum segment size.

I also took screen shots of my grandmother's and great grandfather's Ancestry Finders to show the different results they got. Here they are below:

Grandmother's Ancestry Results

Great Grandfahter's Ancestry Finder results

You can see how some segments my grandmother inherited from her father while other segments don't show up on his. What's really interesting is when segments overlap one another such as where on my great grandfather's Ireland, U.K., Portugal and Switzerland matches overlap. I wonder if they all/most of them share some same common ancestor? Its really cool to play around with the settings and see what countries you have distant cousins in.

I hope I can prove some paper trail matches with these cousins one day!

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About Me

I am an avid amateur genealogist and have been researching my family since I was 14 y/o. Interested in the fields of all things Puerto Rican: genealogy, linguistics, sociocultural anthropology, and diaspora studies. My research mainly revolves around Puerto Rico and as of recently the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe as well as the Balearic island of Mallorca, Spain. Traveling and learning new languages are my favorite hobbies after genealogy, of course!